Stifling creativity: Let’s occupy today’s outmoded corporate copyright laws

Rep. Sonny Bono (post-Cher and before he skied into a tree)

Duke University’s Center for the Study of Public Domain notes that New Year’s Day would have ushered in a wonderful opportunity for creativity if the old copyright laws were still in place. Under the old law, in place until 1978, copyright protected works for 56 years. In 1998, the late Sonny Bono, elected to Congress with lots of Hollywood cash, was instrumental in passing the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act that extended the length of copyright “protection” to 70 years.

Nicknamed the Mickey Mouse law because the Disney Corporation feared that “Steamboat Willie” was about to enter the public domain, Bono’s new law keeps you from using these works as a foundation for new creativity:

• Movies
• To Catch a Thief
• Rebel Without a Cause
• Lady and the Tramp
• The Seven Year Itch
• Night of the Hunter
• East of Eden

• Books
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• Tolkein’s The Return of the King

• Music
• Tutti Frutti
• Blue Suede Shoes
• Ain’t That a Shame
• The Great Pretender

Copyright was originally intended to protect artists, by safeguarding their right to license the use of their intellectual property. The initial term of protection extended 50 years after the artist’s death so that their heirs (think Priscilla and Lisa Marie) would be able to benefit for a while. Not only did the Sonny Bono law extended that term to 70 years for individuals but it extended the term to a whopping 120 years for corporations. All that does, of course, is make the 1% richer at the expense of the 99%.

Lengthening copyright not only defeats the original intent of the law to provide artists a decent living, but it robs today’s artists of opportunities to use old works as a foundation for something new. Shakespeare’s historical plays were based on translations of Plutarch and Ralph Holingshed’s Chronicles. Had Shakespeare not had unfettered access to those source materials, he (or Sir Frances Bacon) might never have written them. (Though I could easily live without Coriolanus.)

Instead of enriching artists, today’s copyright laws all too often clog up the courts with lawsuits filed by so-called copyright trolls. Many of these nefarious companies simply file lawsuit after lawsuit in the hope of pressuring unwitting violators into forking over some cash for what is often an inadvertent use of supposedly protected material.

Detroit’s own Armen Balladian of Bridgeport Records is famous for filing hundreds of copyright lawsuits, most involving claims that others are violating his ownership of music created by Parliament Funkadelic’s George Clinton. (Clinton, on the other hand, claims that Balladian faked documents to gain control of his work.)

In any event, as this article in Slate attests, Balladian’s relentless litigation against rap artists who used mere seconds of a Clinton riff effectively ended the creative use of sampling in hiphop music. At one point, a jury dinged Notorious B.I.G. $4 million for using a snatch of a tune Balladian claimed to own.

Can you hear THIS SNIPPET OF CLINTON’S MUSIC in N.W.A.’s 100 Miles? (Thanks to Slate for digging those out.)

Sadly, many artists lose control of the rights to their creative works to the corporations. Nike paid $500,000 to use The Beatles’ song Revolution in this 1987 ad. (Half the fee went to Michael Jackson who shared ownership of the Beatles’ catalogue.)

This was the era when Nike was accused of using overseas sweatshops to manufacture its trendy sneakers. Hearing his radical lyrics used to hawk overpriced consumer goods made by exploited workers might well have killed John Lennon had he not already been gunned down in 1980. (Many fans still call his death an assassination, not because Mark David Chapman was anything but a mentally deranged fan, but because Lennon stood against the relentless assaults of corporate consumerist culture.)

If copyright law did a better job of enriching artists, it might be worth keeping it intact. But it has become yet another way for corporations to strip artists of control of their creative works, while enriching trolls who treat our courts like casinos. It’s time to begin rolling back the corporate excrescences of the Bono law and do right by yesterday’s artists and today’s.

How the media’s addiction to false equivalence distort our politics

Paul Krugman

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman today returns to the theme that the media allows GOP politicians to wage a campaign of lies with impunity. In this case, he notes that GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is painting President Obama as a an anti-business extremist who wants to level incomes for everyone. Krugman also notes that the press will refuse to call that a lie.

Krugman explains that that GOP candidates have learned to rely on the press’ addiction to the notion of false equivalence since it distorts reality by painting both sides as equally black:

“Oh, Mr. Romney will probably be called on some falsehoods. But, if past experience is any guide, most of the news media will feel as though their reporting must be ‘balanced,’ which means that every time they point out that a Republican lied they have to match it with a comparable accusation against a Democrat — even if what the Democrat said was actually true or, at worst, a minor misstatement.”

He goes on to challenge Politifact for naming “The End of Medicare” as the biggest political lie of 2011, when in fact, the Ryan plan would have ended Medicare as we know it, by turning it into a voucher plan without today’s guarantees.

The media’s unwillingness to distinguish clearly between true and false plays into the hands of those who will lie to win. What that means for today’s politics is that it hands over enormous power to the bullying right, and nowhere is this clearer than in the media’s reluctance to distinguish between Tea Party versus the Occupy approach.

I have been to the Tea Party rallies at the Capitol in Lansing, as well as the union rallies and the Occupy protests this past year, and the differences could not be more stark.

At the Tea Party rallies, the undercurrent of paranoia is palpable, as is a heightened sense of righteous indignation often expressed as smugness. Tea Party rallies are designed to heighten the differences between “us” and “them.”

We are the best, the salt of the earth, the faithful. We tell ourselves apocryphal stories about our righteousness to draw a sharp line that divides us, the elect, from you, the damned, the welfare queens, the socialists, the interlopers, the gays and lesbians, the Muslims and other folks who do not accept Jesus as their savior.

At its core, the Tea Party comes across as a movement dominated by bullies and the folks they have terrified who are manipulated by the sharks who know better. These folks know their ideas are not the majority, but they have pollsters like Frank Luntz who know which words to use to hit hot buttons designed to obscure rather than illumniate. They seduce people by claiming the Founding Fathers’ mantle of democracy while trying to force people to bend to their will.

The Occupy events in contrast embrace inclusion. You are one of us. Come join us as we grope our way toward a better world. We don’t have all the answers but we are searching for the truth.

Here are the facts as we know them. Rising inequality threatens us all. The planet is in peril. But we have faith that we can find a better way together if we join forces. Please come and help us and share your ideas. Our general assemblies let everyone who cares a voice.

Some of the Occupy folks may be naive about what it will take to effect the changes they want to see. But where the Tea Party wears guns on their hips demanding their rights, the Occupy protesters embrace non-violence even as they are being assaulted by police.

Imagine the challenge this poses for traditional reporters inured to the “on the one hand/on the other hand” duality. There are no statistics from anointed experts they can cite to explain the differences. If they quote someone like me, they must immediately dash out to find someone to refute what I am saying. The ethos of false equivalence requires praising and bashing both sides in equal measure, and it serves us ill in an era when the bullies are ascendant.

Look and see the difference:

Seth Godin targets “lazy journalism”

In a recent blog posting, Ideavirus author Seth Godin argues that publishing national news in a local news site is lazy journalism. It may get you a few eyeballs, but it makes no sense in building a long-term audience in a global world.

He cites repeated copies of a story about Louis CK as an example of wasted pixels. He also notes re-tweeting what every reader will learn elsewhere merely slices the news pie thinner and thinner. Leave those re-tweets to the unpaid, he argues, so that journalists can spend their time instead digging out something that others don’t already know.

The challenge for the mainstream media, however, is that it is all about revenue. It’s not just easy but cheap to post items from AP and other sources, and the bottom line is all about the clicks. That’s why Huffington Post and other click-hungry sites can’t resist misleading headlines and teasers – made you look!

The issue is finding a sustainable model to provide quality journalism at the local level. I see non-profit national sites such as Truthout and AlterNet have survived without using these tricks. They rely on advertising as well as on asking visitors for donations or using book or DVD giveaways. The challenge is finding similar models for local news whose reach does not extend as far.

Your thoughts?

Occupy Chicago Tribune raising funds on Kickstarter

Occupy Chicago Tribune on Kickstarter has raised more than $4,000 of the $6,000 they are seeking to publish 20,000 copies of a four-page broadside.

Glad to see the movement is recognizing the importance of creating its own media, but why not an online publication? Cheaper, more environmentally sound and sustainable.

End of meme

Consumerism cool co-opts everything in the long run

I knew the Sixties were over the day in 1970 when I walked into a K-Mart and saw a rack of fringed suede vests with beads. Say no more, say no more.

Salon’s Hack List highlights what’s wrong with today’s political press

Mark Halperin cashes a paycheck for squandering his powerful platform at Time magazine

Salon magazine’s prolific Alex Pareene has finally rolled out 2011’s 20 awfulest political journalists, giving this year’s top honors to Time magazine’s Mark Halperin, calling him “both fixated solely on the horse race and also uniquely bad at analyzing the horse race.”

Halperin is the prototype of the “objective” journalist who prides himself on refusing to comment on anything he sees. Race baiting? Distortions? Outright falsehoods? Let’s instead look at those recent poll numbers that show Ron Paul rising in Iowa.

By treating politics as a sporting event rather than as a contest of ideas with consequences, Halperin squanders the opportunity to use his powerful platform at Time magazine and on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to promote the kind of informed discussion that could make voting more than a tribal exercise in doing what it takes so our team wins. The only time Halperin displayed something resembling passion was the time on Morning Joe that he called Obama a “dick.”

I was actually hoping that the top-of-the-bottom slot would be awarded to Erin Burnett, the latest anchor to fill the ever-changing musical chair in CNN’s unstable 7 p.m. time slot. Pareene awarded her fourth place, acknowledging her spectacularly trivial and patronizing coverage of Occupy Wall Street as her hackiest moment.

Is this relentlessly perky free-market Barbie manufactured by CNBC by way of Goldman Sachs the future face of broadcast news? Heaven help us.

While I was bemoaning the current state of political punditry in the United States, I happened to pick up the year-end double issue of Rolling Stone. In addition to the stellar reporting of Matt Taibbi and Tim Dickinson, the issue featured excerpted quotes from an interview with former NASA scientist Jim Hansen, who has been relentless in trying to persuade the mainstream media to cover climate change as something other than a manufactured controversy. Here’s a few sentences on Obama’s record:

He allowed the usual cast of characters to carry the ball, and they came up with the cockamamie scheme called cap and trade with offsets, in which big banks would be the biggest winners and Big Coal and Big Oil and Big Utilities all were given their share. And the public would get screwed. Energy prices would go up, and there would be almost no impact on solving the climate problem. By staying disengaged, Obama completely blew the chance to really be a great president. He could have changed history.”

The problem isn’t just the voices we hear but those we don’t hear or don’t hear enough of – Jim Hansen, Naomi Klein, Cornel West, Barbara Ehrenreich. Chomsky is frequently featured in the European press, but he says that he often finds himself disinvited on those rare occasions he is offered a platform, even by supposedly progressive news outlets such as PBS. Media moguls often allow incendiary critiques fromthe right, but not the left. (So long, Keith Olbermann.)

The opportunity that the Internet provides us in circumventing commercial media could allow the Occupy movement to create a new online citizen journalism based on providing the 99% the news it wants and needs. Email me at lansingonline AT gmail.com with your ideas and input into how this new media should function.